The Torture is in the Wait
by ladycordelia17
Summary: Gajevy Challenge Week 2015, Day 2: Nursing. Even when she couldn't do as much for him as some of the others, he appreciated her being there for him. Ties in with "What the Fairy Caught." Levy's POV, rated M for language.


**Gajevy Challenge Week 2015, Day 2: Nursing. She might not have been able to do as much for him as some of the others who had attended to him in his wounded state, but he appreciated her being there for him nonetheless.**

_Disclaimer: I own occasional villains and minor characters, and my interpretations of newly-introduced Celestial Spirits, when they apply. Otherwise, Hiro Mashima owns _Fairy Tail_. (And I seriously think he was trying to drive away a large chunk of the fanbase with some recent dick-moves on his part story-wise.)_

**The Torture is in the Wait**

"_Goddamnit, I'm burning like hell and I feel like my fuckin' leg is gonna fall off!"_

"_I know you do; that's why we're getting you to the infirmary as fast as we can."_

"_Wendy'll heal you soon enough, Gajeel."_

I set my book aside on the end table next to my chair and ran downstairs in the direction of the three voices that followed the guild doors crashing open. What they were saying did _not _sound good. (Nor was the fact that I had, once again, lost track of time while reading, but that was beside the point.)

The guild members to whom those voices belonged were headed toward the infirmary as fast as they could go: Pantherlily, Gajeel's Exceed, was in his battle form and was carrying the iron dragon slayer over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, with Juvia following close behind. All three had clearly been in a battle, judging by their torn clothes. Juvia was bruised and scraped in several places but had no serious injuries, while Lily had a blackened right eye and a gash on his head (presumably with the majority of his bruises hidden under his fur). Gajeel, however, had obviously fared the worst: he had some mottled bruising and was sweating profusely all over, but the worst of his injuries appeared to be a series of swollen and purplish bleeding wounds on both front and back of his left thigh, arranged in two jaw-like arcs. Clearly the bite of some creature, possibly a poisonous one, if the wound was bad enough to make it so that Gajeel couldn't walk and had to be carried.

When I reached the infirmary, Gajeel was seated on a bed with his back against the headboard, stripped down to his dark green boxer-briefs, while Juvia was trying (unsuccessfully) to apply a venom-draining poultice to the teeth-wounds. Pantherlily had returned to his normal small size and was flying around, gathering supplies. "If Wendy is around, bring her here," Juvia ordered, apparently not caring who carried out the order as long as it was done.

I glanced behind me to see that Master Makarov had entered the infirmary, with a glimpse of a swishing fur-trimmed longcoat, followed within seconds by a lightning-flash and crash of thunder, telling me that Laxus had apparently gone to find Wendy. "What happened?" the tiny old man questioned. As I stirred a tiny pouch of orange sports-drink mix into a glass of water and encouraged Gajeel to drink it (to replace what water and salts he lost through sweating), Juvia, between her attempts to clean the bite, gave an account of their mission to take out a dark mages' guild called Lernean Scourge. The mission had gone well until they had needed to defeat the guild master, a middle-aged wizard who used earth and wood magics and who dabbled in Celestial Spirit magic. Their opponent summoned Fornax the Brazier, but when Fornax refused to fight an enemy who used water magic, he, the master, summoned Hydra the Many-Headed Beast—and Hydra was responsible for the poisonous bite that had incapacitated Gajeel. Fortunately, however, Juvia had managed to wrest Hydra's silver gate key from the master's grasp.

"So if this creature's poison can't be neutralized with Wendy's magic, we're going to need to rouse Lucy," Master summed up, "because we'll need her to summon the Hydra and find out what treatment Gajeel needs for that bite wound." Oh, Mavis, I hoped we didn't have that worst-case scenario on our hands—_what if the Hydra resist__s__ Lu-chan's demand for answers, or still worse, put__s__ her in the same state that Gajeel__'__s in now?_ I fearfully thought.

We would find out soon enough. A second thunder-crash followed by two sets of footsteps—one running, the other at a fast walk—heralded Laxus' re-entry with Wendy in tow. The little sky-dragon slayer nudged Juvia aside, prompting her to slump into the nearest chair with Hydra's key still clutched tightly in one hand, and Wendy's glowing hands told everyone that she had started to work her healing magic. "No, please," Wendy gave an anguished beg. "I can slow whatever poison is in all these teeth-wounds, but it's not completely going away. And I gotta make it go away before I can heal him."

"Then focus on slowing the poison, child, and heal whatever wounds he has that aren't envenomated," Master encouraged, ignoring Gajeel's next string of pain-induced swear words brought on by sweat running down over a scrape on his side. As I grabbed a clean hand towel and began drying the sweat all over the wounded man's upper body, trying not to take notice of how impressive his physique was, I heard Master tell Laxus to go wake Lucy up and bring her to the guild. _I hope the Hydra cooperates, Lu-chan,_ I thought, _for your sake, Gajeel's, and everyone here._

"Burnin' up," Gajeel panted for the umpteenth time, "I'm burnin' like hell here!"

Dimly I was aware of Juvia filling a bowl with cold water from the nearest sink, followed by a spray bottle, and Pantherlily carrying both items over to me (as Juvia had departed to the main guild hall following the fourth thunder-crash, which signaled Laxus' arrival with Lucy). "Don't worry, Gajeel, we'll cool you down as best we can," Wendy assured our patient before turning to me. "Even slowed, that poison's making his body overheat. Keep him drinking water and sports-drinks, and sponge him off to cool him, or make an ice pack, whatever works." I did as instructed, wetting a sponge with cold water and handing it to Gajeel, along with a glass of water to drink, before I used Solid Script: Ice to conjure ice for a cold pack.

"Oh shit," the iron slayer suddenly muttered, his red eyes widening in fear, and the sentiment echoed in Wendy's sudden pallor. Clearly the two of them, both being dragon slayers, had heard something happening in the main guild hall that did not bode well.

"What more bad news are we looking at?" I asked, already dreading the answer.

Wendy glanced over her shoulder for a moment before turning back to me and resuming her use of magic to slow the Hydra's poison. "It's gonna take Chelia's magic to be able to completely neutralize the poison in all these teeth-wounds," she shakily explained.

I could feel the blood drain from my own face at what this development meant. Chelia Blendy, the renowned Sky God Slayer and the only person capable of neutralizing the poison in Gajeel's Hydra bite if the Spirit could be trusted, hailed from the far-away Lamia Scale guild—if somebody on Fairy Tail called for her help, it would take her hours to get here. Hours that Gajeel didn't have. For a moment I saw a flicker of hope in Wendy's eyes, only for it to be swept away by some other despairing thought. "What is it?" I asked her.

Gajeel answered in Wendy's stead as he took the proffered ice pack from me and applied it to his forehead: "Bunny Girl's ridin' out to get the god-slayer girl—she's got a flyin' horse spirit." _Lu-chan has a Pegasus spirit to ride?_ I thought. When had that happened?

"There was a Pegasus key as part of the reward for an escort mission Lucy and I did just over a week ago," Wendy told me, as if she had read the question in my mind. "Those creatures are really fast fliers—Lucy'll be able to bring Chelia here in half the time it would take a train, or a rental car."

I breathed a sigh of relief—this was the first piece of good news any of us had gotten all night. Errantly I thought of a fairy tale involving a hunter with five animal companions (a hare, a fox, a wolf, a bear, and a lion), where, at one point when the hunter was dying of a wound, the hare had made a journey all alone to a remote mountain where grew a miraculous life-giving root, in a desperate bid to save the hunter's life. Lucy was like the hare in the story, only instead of harvesting a rare plant, she needed to act as transport for a human healer with the aid of her new Spirit. _Lu-chan, I hope you know what you're doing,_ I prayed. There was always the possibility of her not having the strength to sustain her new Pegasus spirit on the long flight to Lamia Scale and back, or the return journey taking much more out of her due to carrying two riders on her steed. Or—_oh, gods, what if Lu-chan and Chelia get attacked by something they can't outrun on the way?_

"Have faith in Lucy now, brats," Master told us in a heavy tone upon returning to the infirmary once he had sent word to Lamia Scale that Fairy Tail called for Chelia's aid and had already arranged transport. "All we can do is keep doing what we're doing until further help arrives."

For the next three hours, the waiting was torture. Half an hour in, Wendy's energy level had become distressingly low, and I had to write a rune for energy-transfer on the palm of the all-wound-up-with-nowhere-to-go Laxus so that he could transfer his magic to Wendy when she needed a boost. (I had tried giving my own energy first, but Wendy's nature as a dragon slayer made it not nearly effective enough for the drain it caused me.) "No paperwork's gettin' done tonight," the lightning mage offhandedly told his grandfather, which was true; the old master would have, in all likelihood, had Laxus burning midnight oil to do guild paperwork had recent events not happened.

I kept alternating between giving Gajeel water and sports-drink, and helping him dry off when he became sweaty—taking care to prevent sweat from dripping into the poisoned teeth-wounds on his thigh as well as I could, as the resulting pain caused him to thrash and curse, forcing Master to restrain him with Titan magic, lest he knock me or Wendy across the room in his thrashing. Wendy kept working her healing magic to slow the poison in the Hydra bite and to try and reduce the iron slayer's dangerously-high fever, and three more times Laxus put a bracing rune-written hand on Wendy's turquoise-Fairy-Tail-marked shoulder to restore her flagging magic levels. As the wait hit the two-and-a-half-hour mark, Gajeel had stopped letting out the strings of obscenities that told us of his pain, and started to threaten to lose consciousness, forcing Laxus to shock him into wakefulness with the warning of "you'll die if we let you fall asleep." _Should it really be taking Lu-chan and Chelia this long to get here?_ I thought despairingly as I watched Gajeel's condition deteriorate. _What if something happened to them?_

So lost in morbid thought, I was barely aware of hearing running footsteps, followed by a girl with seriously-windblown pink hair entering the infirmary. Chelia had finally arrived, much to everyone's joyous relief, and wasted no time in nudging Wendy aside and working her own, more potent, healing magic on Gajeel's Hydra bite. "He's out of danger now," the young god slayer was able to report at last. "He might have trouble walking on that leg for a day, but he'll be fine with a good night's sleep and a few square meals—including, of course, plenty of iron."

"Thank Mavis," Master Makarov sighed before he admonished Wendy and Chelia to go and get some much-needed sleep. A collective murmuring throughout the infirmary echoed the sentiment.

It registered in my mind, however, that even with Gajeel out of danger, something still wasn't right...and Laxus' sudden hasty departure made me realize _what_ wasn't right. Lucy hadn't followed Chelia in with a fretful inquiry over the wounded man's condition. Stroking a hand along Gajeel's sweaty face one last time as he finally let himself lie down and sleep, I exited the infirmary to go and find my best friend and fellow bookworm.

The sight that greeted me confirmed what I had suspected of Lucy's fate. Laxus returned from just outside the main entrance of the guild hall, carrying Lucy bridal-style in his arms, the Celestial Spirit mage unconscious and still dressed head-to-toe in windy-weather riding gear. As the lightning mage carried his precious burden upstairs to the second floor, presumably to his office, Wendy and Chelia looked at each other for a moment before the latter followed Laxus upstairs. "How is Lu-chan doing?" I asked when the sky god slayer came back downstairs a minute or two later.

"She's not hurt, just exhausted from using too much magic to get to Lamia Scale and then bring me here," Chelia answered, sad but reassuring. "I'm glad Jura thought of giving her a dose of magic-refill potion to drink; she never would've made it without it." _Poor Lu-chan,_ I couldn't help but think, _if you collapsed at the end of your journey even _after _you had an energy boost..._ The implications did not bear thinking about.

Just as exhausted by the night's events as everyone else involved, I was barely aware of making my way back to the infirmary. Only when I woke the following morning, to the feel of a heavy hand stroking my hair, did I realize the position I had fallen asleep in: I was seated in a chair beside Gajeel's bed and hunched over the side, resting my head on his muscled shoulder and a hand over his now slow-beating heart. "Oi, Levy," I heard his gruff voice say aloud to me at last, and I jerked away in embarrassment, wincing in pain when the movement yanked on muscles made sore by my awkward sleeping position.

Only then did I realize how Gajeel had addressed me. I could count on one hand the number of times that he had called me by name in the time we had known each other; mostly he called me Shrimp or Shorty because of my small stature. Before I could think to reply, he caught my hand, bringing it up toward his face and leaning into my touch. "Glad you were here last night, thought that fucker with all the heads was gonna be the death of me."

"Even though I wasn't the one with the healing magic?" I asked, somewhat sadly. "Even though I could only do what anybody who tried to help you would've done?"

"Don't sell yourself short, Shrimp," the iron slayer admonished. "Even if anyone coulda cleaned me up an' kept me drinkin' water an' that orange...whatever the hell it is that's supposed to replace what I kept sweatin' out...I like it a shitload better when it's you doin' it."

Unfortunately, any more words either of us might have said had to wait, because Wendy had stepped into the infirmary, anxious to give Gajeel one last check-over before (hopefully) she could pronounce him clear to leave and rejoin Fairy Tail in its daily madness. She called on her patient to try and walk around a bit, and when he did so with no visible favoring of the injured leg, "Good, very good. You'll want to avoid fighting for at least today and tomorrow, Gajeel, but get a few nice big meals in you and you'll be back to feeling great before you know it." Then the cute sky-dragon slayer turned to me with an admonition, belied by the gleam of humor in her eyes: "And Levy, you'd best tell Mira to stop matchmaking and start cooking an iron-dragon's breakfast."

"She's right," said iron slayer concurred. "Damn she-demon's carryin' on about that green fairy catchin' Bunny Girl and the sparkplug crashed together upstairs."

He may not have told me that he loved me, nor asked me to be his girlfriend, but to admit he preferred my ministration's to anyone else's...if nothing else, it was a start.


End file.
